Roger Heppleston

How can it be morally justified to risk the future lives of our children? The biological purpose of human existence is the preservation of our species, and yet somehow the threat of climate change doesn’t register as an overwhelming moral issue. Religious authorities are supposed set moral standards, and yet Evangelical religions and the Catholic Church are much more concerned with today’s unborn children than worrying about the prospects for future generations. How can this be so?

We are suffering a crisis of moral leadership. Our religious and political leaders are overwhelmed by their own issues born of past events. No one is looking at the big picture or is statesman enough to to lead us safely through the year’s ahead.

We have been told that we should cut back on flying and eating meat if we are to have a chance of reducing carbon emissions to zero. If we had leaders who exercised moral authority and showed their commitment by changing their own lifestyle, then perhaps the public at large would follow. Right now, we seem to be stuck in a moral abyss and drifting towards ecological tragedy.

GDP growth isn’t the only objective for society, though sometimes it seems to be the only measure of success that all our politicians endorse. There are arguably other more relevant measures of a nation’s success. This week the UK’s Office of National Statistics published its figures on life expectancy for 2015 to 2017; it shows that life expectancy in the UK is 79 years for men and 83 years for women.

Surely most of us would like to live longer, but it is currently a post code lottery. In some regions of Scotland and the North you are likely to live 10 years less than people living in the South East. The reasons are unclear. As Southerners are not physically different than Northerners, it must be due to lifestyle issues like diet, exercise and drug consumption or stress related issues like poverty, caring and unemployment. These are factors that are in the power of society to change by policy, education and example.

Wouldn’t everyone welcome an initiative to improve life expectancy. Shouldn’t life expectancy be high on the list of success factors for our society. Let’s encourage politicians, economists and civil servants to make it a national imperative.

Homo sapiens is a tribal species with a dangerous propensity to unite ‘us’ against ’the rest’. Our history is marred with despicable acts of cruelty, as contact between different hunter-gatherer bands, tribes and states turned into inter-community hatred and violence. Since the Enlightenment the level of violent conflict has declined and the major powers of the world have learned to live in peace with each other. However, inter-community hatred is still present and can bubble up at any time. When combined with differences in physical characteristics this inter-community antagonism is known as racism.

Those in the Eugenics movement in the early twentieth century tried to show that this racial division had a scientific basis; that different races were essentially different species. This has since been disproved; we now know we are all one species that emerged some 200,000 years ago in Africa. The latest proof comes from David Reich in his book Who We are and How We got Here. He has shown conclusively that the makeup of our DNA is a result of tens of thousands of years of intermixing of peoples from different geographical regions. Differences in skin colour and facial and physical characteristics between people from different countries account for only one sixth of the natural variation in DNA between humans.

Racial hatred is a cultural issue that has no scientific validity. This does not mean that it does not exist or is not important. It is part of our inherited tribal behaviour; it can only be overcome by changing cultural habits. Groups of humans always have a choice about the way they interact with other groups; they can compete or co-operate. In our globally integrated world competition that leads to hatred and violence is especially destructive. This is why developing a culture that can unite people of different cultures, religions and nations is so important for the future of mankind.

We need our politicians to plan our country’s future. We know that society is aging and that this will create huge problems for our health and social services. Surely the least we could ask of our politicians is to have a plan to deal with this challenge?

The number of people over 85 that require 24-hour care will double in the next 2 decades.

British women are amongst the least healthy in Europe; they are more likely to suffer diabetes, breast cancer and Alzheimer’s at an early age.

Whilst life expectancy is increasing for women, healthy life expectancy remains constant. Women are spending longer living with chronic health conditions

These are just a few of the issues. The NHS and Social Services stumble from crisis to crisis. There is no plan. Our politicians have no clue what to do and there is no initiative to tackle the problem. We are all going to suffer in the years to come from our leaders’ lack of political foresight.

Environmental activists are encouraging us all to become vegans because methane emissions by ruminants are a major cause of climate change. There’s no question that we should be eating less meat but Isabella Tree in her book Wilding: The Return of nature to the British Farm argues that veganism also has environmental downsides. She says:

[Veganism] drives up demand for crops that require high inputs of fertiliser, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides, while demonising sustainable forms of livestock farming that can restore soils and biodiversity, and sequester carbon… Counter-intuitive as it may seem, adding the occasional organic pasture-fed steak to your diet, could be the right way to square the circle.

How do we develop the habits and systems that preserve nature and reduce pollution? Most people would agree with the aim of living a sustainable life on Earth. However, they do little in practice; compared with other pressures on their lives, creating an eco-friendly society seems much less important and far too difficult.

In Compete or Cooperate, Roger Heppleston argues that creating an eco-friendly society will only happen if the moral culture of society as a whole changes. The wave of hot weather that has swept the world this summer has finally convinced most people that climate change is real. As the environment deteriorates further and the effects of climate change bite harder, people will gradually come to realise the importance of preserving the planet for our children. When this happens, we will develop a practical set of moral imperatives that each of us can follow to preserve the environment.

The aim of the Eco-humanity website is to accelerate this process by drawing up a practical set of moral behaviours that support a life-fulfilling, eco-friendly society. These should be capable of being adopted by people of all cultural backgrounds. A first suggestion is shown on the Sustainable Lifestyle web page. Please let us know your views.

Every week we dutifully wash out used plastic containers and put them in the recyclable waste bin for collection by the council. It now transpires this is largely wasted effort.

The Local Government Association says that two thirds of plastic is unrecyclable and being sent to landfill. This is a scandal. Even industry sources say that most packaging could be made to be recyclable. But yet again the government and industry leaders are letting us down. No one is looking at the big picture and ensuring that we do the right thing. Simple inexpensive solutions that would drastically reduce plastic waste are not being applied.

What can we do as consumers? Well, for a start, we can stop buying anything in black plastic containers. The only reason black plastic is being used is that it makes the food look good. However black is the only colour that can’t be easily scanned by recycling machines; as a result, all black plastics are being sent to landfill.

Stopping buying black plastic is just a first step, but we need to make a stand and take action to show we care about our environment.

It will aim to a library of articles and books that show the development of human evolutionary change. It will show how global warming, the destruction of the natural world, the headlong pursuit of technological development and economic growth combined with the misuse of political power is creating a divided world that is destroying the planet

With extreme temperatures being reported across the world, this could be the year when the public at large finally believe that climate change is happening. Belief is one thing, doing something about it is another. The first reaction seems to be to cope rather than to address the fundamental problem. In the UK we are talking of installing air conditioning into our homes and workplaces. This will only make matters worse.

This is just the beginning; as we continue to pump green house gases into the atmosphere, temperatures will rise further. We need preventative action now if we are to mitigate the worst effects of climate change

The world is sweltering in a massive heat wave causing wildfires, drought and distress. The scientists told us this would happen if we didn’t cut back on the emission of greenhouse gases. Climate change is happening before our eyes and, so far, little has been done to prevent the continuing deterioration of the biosphere.

But where is the anger and alarm? There is a Dad’s army mentality around of muddling through. It seems the human instinct is to accept what is happening and make the best of it. We seem to be prepared to accept the direction that evolution is taking us. This is defeatism. We can only preserve the planet if we insist on sustainability as a critical moral principle and develop actions accordingly.

Only when the public response to heat waves is outrage rather than passive acceptance will we begin to mitigate this impending disaster.